AtTask pulls in $38M series D — bringing it one step closer to an exit

AtTask, an enterprise work management provider, has closed a $38 million fourth round of funding to expand sales and marketing and to invest further in product development.

By “work management,” AtTask means tools for organizing business teams and getting them to work together better: Project management, document sharing and collaboration, workflow management, internal help desk management, time tracking, budgeting, and reporting. All of AtTask’s solutions are provided in an integrated, web-based solution delvered via the cloud: In other words, it’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.

One of the promises of AtTask is reducing communications clutter from numerous emails and IMs, by centralizing project planning — and project work — in a single, cloud-based environment.

AtTask’s market is large enterprise companies willing to pay significant cash and invest significant time in making a solution like this work.

“It’s an enterprise product. We really focus on clients that are going to step up and focus on making it a successful implementation,” chief executive Eric Morgan told VentureBeat.

“It’s not a highly complex product, but you don’t just slap it in there and hope it will work, either,” he added. “That’s the formula that works for us.”

It seems to be working: AtTask has 1,000 paying customers, of which 80 are paying $100,000 per year or more in recurring subscription fees. The company doesn’t publicize exact revenue figures, but Morgan indicated that revenues of $100,000 to $200,000 per employee would be typical for a company like AtTask, and that its revenues were in line with those expectations. With 400 employees, that would put the company’s revenues between $40 million and $80 million annually.

The Series D was led by JMI Equity, a growth equity firm. The firm typically invests in later-stage startups with an eye towards preparing them for a lucrative exit, either via acquisition or IPO. Previous JMI investments include Eloqua (which JMI invested in in October, 2007, and which was acquired by Oracle in December, 2012) and ServiceNow (JMI investment December, 2006; IPO June, 2012).

“Our investment in AtTask draws parallels to our experience at Eloqua and ServiceNow, where we invested at key points in each company’s growth and helped fuel their expansion,” JMI general partner Peter Arrowsmith said in a statement.

In other words: Bring on the growth; we’re looking forward to the exit.

“We’re going to have some good choices in the next 12-24 months about whether we go public or continue growing as a private company,” Morgan told VentureBeat.

As for growth, AtTask has already been posting double-digit revenue growth, and boasts Trek, LiveNation, ATB Financial, Carphone Warehouse, Lexis Nexis, and Schneider Electric among its customers. In January, the company noted that it had grown customer subscriptions by 50 percent overall in the past year, while increasing recurring subscriptions (from existing customers) by 63 percent and new business subscriptions by 42 percent.

The company competes with task management companies like Asana, project-management companies like Clarizen and 37 Signals, enterprise management companies like Workday, and numerous other cloud-based service providers. Morgan said that Clarizen and Microsoft Project (an installed software solution, not a cloud-based tool) were its most direct enterprise competitors.

AtTask is based in Utah (its press release is datelined “Silicon Slopes, Utah” — but we know that’s not a real place) and was founded in 2001 by Scott Johnson, now the company’s chairman. It has 400 employees in Utah and other locations around the world.